I think True Detective is stunning, but certainly a slow-boil. It has more than a hint of Southern gothic horror - especially considering (spoilers under the cut)...

...the serial killer is explicitly shown to be influenced by The King In Yellow, protagonist Rust Cohle hallucinates like a SOB and there's a preacher at the start of episode 3 who throws in all sorts of Lovecraftian shit into his sermons.

the description of M-Theory and higher-dimensional time viewpoint is explicitly that of The King-Of-All-Tears in The Invisibles - aka The Yellow King.I'm going with Rust Cohle as a Blank Badge, back from 7 years training in the Invisible College to bring down the Tuttle-run Carcosa cult.

I was surprised at how sudden and unceremonious her death was, but after the first episode and a quarter, they ran out of clear motivation for all the main characters and yeah I'm finding it kind of hard to care about the show now.

"The first time I got excited about writing was reading comic books by Alan Moore and Grant Morrison as a kid. Growing up in southwest Louisiana, in a house without many books, the sophistication and depth of their stories were really mind-blowing for a kid."

Hell, Morrison might even have been his gateway into The King In Yellow.

@Cat Vincent: No doubts here, it's definitely 'An The Invisibles Mystery' in my book, especially as in a more recent interview regarding the latest episode Pizzolato is explicit about his intent with Cohle's "Time is a flat circle" rant

Same as your earlier Daily Beast Ep.5 link, Cat, that post of yours reminded me I'd be able to catch it but I didn't click the link to avoid spoilers. How glad am I didn't automatically re-post the link like a berk now?!

I’ve put off going into the philosophy Cohle espouses in the early episodes because I don’t want people making assumptions about the character of Cohle, or the ultimate aim of this season. The totality of Cohle’s character and the show’s agenda won’t be clear until the eighth episode has ended. It’s also important to me that the mass audience doesn’t need to know or engage these associations in order to enjoy the show. Likewise, I wouldn’t want any viewers to assume we had some nihilistic agenda, or reduce Cohle to an anti-natalist or nihilist. Cohle is more complicated than that. As I’ve said recently, Cohle may claim to be a nihilist, but an observation of him reveals otherwise. Far from “nothing meaning anything” to him, it’s almost as though everything means too much to him. He’s too passionate, too acutely sensitive, and he cares too much to be labeled a successful nihilist. And in his monologues, don’t we detect a whiff of desperation akin to someone who protests too much? When Cohle speaks of the unspeakable, is it with the same illusory perspective as when Hart speaks about the importance of having rules and boundaries? Perhaps that is what Hart references when he tells Cohle in episode 3, “You sound panicked.”

That doesn’t lessen the potential validity of the ideas he expresses, and that is what I finally think is disturbing about the show so far. It’s not the serial killer that’s unsettling; television shows you far worse than that all the time. What unsettles are the aspects of being human which the show chooses to highlight. That this stuff is being delivered through actors as instantly amiable and comforting as Harrelson and McConaughey makes it doubly subversive. And then I think you’ll find, as we go forward, the show keeps subverting its own subversions.